nature

September 12, 2025

Book Review: The Death and Life of the Great Lakes

HOMES. Ask any Michigander what the acronym means, and they’ll rattle off Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, Superior. The Great Lakes. As I sometimes remind my husband, when/if we run out of water here in the arid West, I’m going home to where 25% of the world’s freshwater lives. Not just the United States, a quarter of the fresh water in the entire world is contained in the boundaries of these five bodies of water. They are truly natural marvels.

I hope, as the world becomes more and more aware of the value of fresh, clean water, that we’ll all be more interested in what is happening with the Great Lakes, because while they are awe-inspiring, they’re certainly not magical or impervious to harm. Dan Egan’s The Death and Life of the Great Lakes explores the major crises that have challenged these inland seas. The first issue he focuses on is the Saint Lawrence Seaway, excitedly sold as a way to make Midwestern lakeshore communities into the kind of bustling port cities of the oceanic coast. But while the promised boat traffic has mostly failed to materialize, the ones that have made use of the channel have brought dangerous invaders like zebra mussels and alewives in with their ballast water. And then there’s one of American engineering’s true marvels, the backwards flow of the Chicago River. Designed to improve sanitary health in America’s Second City, the threat of Asian carp crossing into a Great Lakes ecosystem wholly unprepared for them remains real.

The question that reveals itself as central to the book is what the lakes are “for”, exactly. As new species get inevitably introduced by the activities of humankind, sometimes even in the face of safety measures, how should we respond, if at all? Are the Lakes meant to be for recreational pleasure for boaters and swimmers? Are they meant to be for fisherman in search of an exciting catch? Are they meant to increase the economic prosperity of the people who live on their shores and in the surrounding communities? Or should they exist in as close to their natural state as possible? Egan recounts conversations with people with many different answers to these questions, which seem to be influenced by where they’ve been educated, where they grew up, and the root of their own attachment to the Lakes and their shining waters.

As someone with a pre-existing deep emotional bond to the Lakes, I found this book to be an engaging read. Egan’s history of the Lakes is thorough but not exhausting, and his own level of care for them shines through his writing. He’s thoughtful…though he recounts both past disasters and potential future threats to the vitality of the Lakes, he doesn’t get overwrought or come off as scare-mongering. I will say that I’m not sure, if you don’t come in caring about what becomes of the Lakes, that he does a great job of building a case about why you should. The realization that one of every four gallons of fresh water for the entire world can be found in them should be enough, but when he depicts the ways that the Lakes have gotten to at least some level of recovery through crisis after crisis, the whole thing feels less urgent than it could have been. It’s better journalism, but it’s less successful at impressing the importance of the issue to the reader. Nevertheless, I think this is an extremely important book about a pressing environmental concern, and a well-written and interesting one at that. I would definitely recommend it to everyone!

May 8, 2025

Book Review: The Overstory

“Love is a tree with branches in forever with roots in eternity and a trunk nowhere at all.”

When I was little, we had a weeping willow tree outside our house that I absolutely loved. I have so many memories of looking up into those elegantly arching branches, watching them sway in the wind. Those tiny little leaves were a real pain to rake up in the fall, always seeming to escape between the tines of the rake. When I was in high school, the tree was invaded by carpenter ants, who ate up enough of its structure that it was irreparably damaged. It eventually lost a large limb, which crashed into the house when we were out of town one weekend, and then the whole tree had to come down. But I still miss it.

I have to imagine that many of us (if we grew up in a place that had trees) have a favorite childhood tree. Richard Powers’ The Overstory begins with the stories of nine Americans and their relationships with trees: from an Iowa farm boy whose ancestors planted a chestnut tree that became a community landmark, to a veteran who crashes into a tree when fighting overseas, to a young woman, Olivia, who accidentally electrocute herself and wakes up on a mission to find a cause to fight for, leaving college to drive across the country to help save the last of the redwoods. On her way, she finds Nick (the aforementioned farm boy, whose entire family died in a carbon monoxide accident, and whose tree is dying), who joins her. The two join a group of environmentalists, and agree to spend a couple weeks sitting in a giant old tree named Mimas to prevent its felling…which turns into more than a year. A young (probably autistic) psychology grad student, Adam, briefly joins them in an attempt to talk them down, and is instead converted to their cause. The three take part in the arson of a logging facility, which has tragic results.

There are other characters who are involved in the arson: the veteran, Doug, as well as an engineer daughter of a Chinese immigrant, Mimi. And then there are a few characters who exist somewhat outside the main narrative, including Neelay Mehta, whose childhood fall from a tree leaves him wheelchair-bound, but who creates an immersive video game that captures the world’s attention, Patricia Westerford, a researcher whose book about trees becomes a touchstone for many of the characters, and an odd couple, buttoned-down Ray and free-spirited Dorothy, who grow to love trees after a terrible accident strikes one of them. Each is touched and inspired by nature in their own way, and each character’s story weaves in and out of the others, culminating in a dramatic trial.

This is a long, highly ambitious novel, the kind that just feels like a prize-winner. The first third or so is dedicated to the backstories of the characters, and it is here that Powers comes closest to realizing what he’s trying to do. They read like exquisitely crafted short stories, each one hitting the same general theme of “early connection with trees” but not at all feeling same-y. Though I am not a particular fan of short stories, these ones were so good I found myself completely immersed and hoping that the book would continue on in a “viewpoint chapter” kind of way. Sadly, for me, once the introductions are laid out, the book turns into a more conventional narrative. From that point forward, I found it very hit-and-miss.

When it hits, it’s fantastic: the section in which Nick and Olivia live in Mimas, though requiring some suspension of disbelief, has a real magic to it, as does Patricia’s entire narrative (hers was my favorite storyline). But Powers often seems to lose track of his characters: I didn’t believe for a second that Adam, as written, would play the role that he did alongside Nick and Olivia, nor does Mimi’s transformation from go-getting corporate drone to hardcore environmental radical feel realistic, and these missteps undermine the narrative. But what keeps the whole thing (mostly) hanging together is Powers’s powerful sense of urgency about the need to protect the ever-smaller number of trees that remain in the world. As the very real effects of global climate change continue to make themselves known, I expect to see more fiction along these lines. This is a book that will prove hard to live up to in some ways, but it’s too much of a mixed bag to give an unqualified recommendation to. If you have Tree Feelings, this will likely be well-worth your time, but if not it may feel like it drags.

April 30, 2020

Book 231: On Trails

“When I was younger I used to see the earth as a fundamentally stable and serene place, possessed of a delicate, nearly divine balance, which humans had somehow managed to upset. But as I studied trails more closely, this fantasy gradually evaporated. I now see the earth as a collaborative artwork of trillions of sculptors, large and small. Sheep, humans, elephants, ants: each of us alters the world in our passage.”

Dates read: May 3-7, 2018

Rating: 3/10

There’s an outdoorsy, hiking culture in the West that’s unlike anything I ever knew growing up in southeast Michigan. People camped (which I quickly discovered was Not For Me) occasionally, but generally spending time outside consisted of making friends with someone who had a lake house and then going out on the boat. The only time I’d ever hiked was on trips to the Upper Peninsula to visit family, and that was under duress. But on the other side of the country, spending time in the wilderness is treated with a kind of reverence. I have to confess I remain unconverted…I’m not deeply opposed to getting out there for a few hours, but left to my own devices I’d rather stay home and read.

Even out here, though, there are casual weekend-type hikers and then there are the truly insane, the kind who do things like hike the entire Pacific Coast Trail, or its east coast counterpart, the Appalachian Trail. Robert Moor is one of the latter kind of people, and his experience “through-hiking” (start point to end point, not just doing the odd segment here or there) the Appalachian Trail inspired him to write On Trails. In it, he examines not only the trail he hiked (his experiences with it form a significant part of the book), but trails and paths the world over. Human trails, yes, but also ant trails, sheep trails, elephant trails, the entire idea behind trails and paths and what they signify.

Moor is committed to offering a broad perspective on trails and trail-making, and while his efforts to get across the long, long history of this behavior among living organisms (he recounts a trip to Canada where he goes to talk to scientists conducting research into the very first fossil evidence of trails among very small organisms) is laudable, this book as a whole is just terribly organized. If Moore doesn’t have ADD, he does a very good impression of someone who has it. He’s jumping all over the place constantly, from his through-hike to micro-organisms to ants to sheep now back to ants and then elephants you guys! Now some Native American trails and then back to another subject and everything is touched on briefly instead of explored in depth, and all of this together just drove me batty trying to get into it.

And the parts based around the Appalachian Trail and Moor’s hike of it? Could not have been less interested. Navel-gazing outdoors-y memoirs do less than nothing for me. Congratulations, you undertook a challenging experience that you knew full well would be challenging going in and learned and grew and that’s great for you, I wish you the best in your future endeavors, but I really don’t care. I already didn’t especially enjoy the book, but then we came to the Epilogue and holy smokes you guys, this sent me into an almost burning rage. Moor chronicles time spent hiking with a guy called “Nimblewill Norman”, apparently something of a legend among serious hikers, who basically just abandoned everyone in his life and decided to be constantly hiking and has been doing so for years. While Moor doesn’t present him in an entirely positive light, he gives him and what he represents (the kind of people who get all Holden Caulfield about how society is “fake” and they just need to be free from outside expectations at the monetary and emotional expense of everyone who’s invested their time and energy into them) a kind of respect that it absolutely does not deserve. I hated Norman so much. And Moor also takes the opportunity in this section to repeat many of the often shallow and trite observations he made about paths and trails over the course of the book and getting all of that together completely destroyed any regard I might have had for it.

Now for a caveat: this was a book club selection, and I was essentially alone in that I did not like it. Most of the other members of the group at least liked it, and a couple of them outright loved it. It seemed like most of the rest of the group had a connection to hiking experiences and perhaps this is the source of some of the disconnect between book and reader on my part. As always, my impressions are my own and what I bring to and take away from the book might be extremely different than anyone else. That being said, I hated this and would heartily recommend avoiding it at all costs.

One year ago, I was reading: First (review to come)

Two years ago, I was reading: The Book of Unknown Americans

Three years ago, I was reading: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

Four years ago, I was reading: Chasing the Sun

March 5, 2020

Book 223: Silent Spring

“To the public, the choice may easily appear to be one of stark simplicity: Shall we have birds or shall we have elms? But it is not as simple as that, and by one of the ironies that abound throughout the field of chemical control, we may very well end by having neither if we continue on our present, well-traveled road. Spraying is killing the birds but it is not saving the elms.”

Dates read: April 8-11, 2018

Rating: 7/10

Lists/awards: The New York Times best-seller

A sound that never fails to bring me straight back into my childhood is the nighttime song of spring peepers. I never thought I’d miss the high-pitched chorus emanating from the marshland behind us loud enough to be heard through even closed windows, but sometimes I long for it with an intensity that’s hard to describe. They don’t exist out here in the arid West, though they’re widespread in the more humid regions of the country. At least, they are now. But like all wildlife, they’re vulnerable to the decisions made by humans and could very well disappear one day.

The capacity for humans to not think through the ramifications of their choices on the environment and destroy it without meaning to do so inspired Rachel Carson’s classic Silent Spring. In it, she traces the links between the rising use of pesticides and insecticides and the devastating consequences it has had for animal life in areas where application is wide-spread. Worse yet, it often doesn’t accomplish the desired effect in the long term, which just encourages even heavier use. She doesn’t flinch away from the fact that humans are animals, too, and highlights the issues that can arise for the people who live in the often-rural and therefore less-seen communities where these poisons are used most significantly. And since these people frequently eat locally-sourced meat and fish, the problem of biological magnification (animals eating food that has its own level of exposure, compounding with each step up the food chain) becomes even more pressing for them.

Carson writes all of this in strong, clear prose that first explains the concepts she’s introducing and then illustrates them with examples of the devastating effects of poisons that are marketed as safe and effective on life, from plants all the way up to people. She doesn’t condescend and though her urgency is clear, it doesn’t feel alarmist or like a scare tactic. Instead, she presents her case that we need to start paying attention and questioning what we’re told rigorously but understandably. Science writing often veers into the esoteric, and this book should be used an exemplar for how to write for the popular market without getting bogged down in details or sidetracked into areas more consequential for the author than the reader.

This book’s continuing relevance even after it led to the the ban of DDT, the chemical she primarily discusses, is a result of both Carson’s skill as a writer and the impact her work managed to have on the public. Not only did it take DDT off the market, it blazed the path that eventually led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency by President Nixon. Imaging a book being so popular and espousing its cause so effectively that it led to the creation of a new federal agency in today’s world seems preposterous. All of that being said, this book wasn’t an unqualified success for me. After a while, her constant use of examples of a chemical being introduced and the death of wildlife that followed started to feel repetitive, blunting its impact. And I found myself a bit skeptical of the rosiness with which she portrayed the alternative option of importing predators for invasive species control…to the best of my understanding, that can have harmful side effects of its own. All in all, though, this book is readable, relevant, and worth a perusal before you go nuts with the Round-Up on the dandelions.

One year ago, I was reading: If Beale Street Could Talk (review to come)

Two years ago, I was reading: Good Omens

Three years ago, I was reading: Die A Little

Four years ago, I was reading: The Good Earth

August 23, 2018

Book 143: The Highest Tide

“Olympia rain rarely calls for hats, much less umbrellas, but this was a waterfall. And by one forty-five in the morning I saw the auras of the remaining biologists, or maybe it was just backlit mist. What I do know is that I saw a blue light around every one of their heads. And Florence had taught me that people with blue auras are relaxed and ready for anything, which suited these people perfectly.”

Dates read: May 1-5, 2017

Rating: 4/10

When I was a kid, I was obsessed with dogs. OBSESSED. Like, I bought a copy of the AKC breed manual and read it like a book, cover to cover, over and over. I also went through a phase of intense obsession with mythology, even writing a letter to The Detroit News when they published a piece that misgendered Osiris. It seems like that’s something we lose in adulthood, the ability to become passionately wrapped up in a single topic like that. We have so many other things to think about, it makes sense, but it still feels like kind of a loss, realizing those days of throwing myself wholeheartedly into something new are behind me.

In Jim Lynch’s The Highest Tide, 13 year-old Miles O’Malley is a budding marine biologist. Not in the way of like, teenagers who think that means getting to play with dolphins all day for a job. But in the way where he reads and re-reads Rachel Carson’s works on oceans, cares about the ecosystem, and regularly sneaks outside to kayak along the Puget Sound beach he lives on to explore what the animals who live in the water are up to. On one such adventure, early in the summer before he begins high school, he discovers a giant squid washed up on the shore. And so begins a season that will change his life forever.

Like so many adolescents, everything is changing for Miles. His parents seem headed toward an end of their long-shaky marriage, he nurses a desperate crush on Angie, the older, bipolar girl next door who used to babysit him, he becomes a figure of devotion for a local cult-type group, he feels queasy about the older man he sells aquarium specimens to, and he faces the increasing deterioration of his best friend, the old lady who lives next door. Miles is confused about virtually all of the above, not quite knowing how to handle any of it. On top of it all, he’s extremely self-conscious about his diminutive stature and has very few friends his own age.

This is a fairly slim book (only about 250 pages), and the feeling I was left with at the end was that it tried to take on too much without doing any of it particularly well. There are too many plot threads and none of them are developed properly. Lynch sketches Miles as a sensitive, observant boy, and I wish he’d dropped some of elements he piled on (the shady animal dealer and the cult group in particular don’t resonate well) and given the rest some room to breathe. In particular, I felt like Angie got the short shrift…I can see what the appeal of her would be to Miles, but I never got much of a sense of what the appeal of Miles would be to her. She’s given an interesting story: daughter of a prominent local judge with not-adequately-treated mental health issues and a wild streak, but she’s never realized as an actual character. Lynch’s prose is adequate, but doesn’t do anything in terms of making up for the plot issues.

Reading books like this, though, makes me reflect on the enduring popularity of the coming-of-age genre. I think the appetite for books in this sphere explains a lot of the appeal of the YA boom: people really like stories about growing up. In part, I think this is because even the culturally-recognized “growing-up” period has gotten extended…just look at how much later my generation is doing things like getting married and buying houses, in large part, that our parents’ generation or even Gen X. And even now, firmly in undisputed adult territory, I still feel like I’m not done growing and changing yet. Maturing is a process that feels like it’ll never really be done, and stories that reflect the sometimes-painful but always-necessary movement forward are very appealing. I wish The Highest Tide were a better example of the type, but not every book does it for every one. There’s good stuff in this one, it’s more frustrating than bad, but I still wouldn’t recommend it when there are so many in this category that do it better.

Tell me, blog friends…what were your childhood obsessions?

One year ago, I was reading: The Idiot

Two years ago, I was reading: The Last One

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